


Call to War

by shooting-stetsons (hulksmashmouth)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Childhood Sexual Abuse, F/M, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Infant Death, No Shame Ficathon, No shame november, Suicide Attempt, oc fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-30 17:43:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5173340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hulksmashmouth/pseuds/shooting-stetsons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The chronicle of a junior SHIELD counselor the day the Triskelion fell - and everything after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, I've actually been wanting to write this fic for a while, but I've finally decided to do it as part of the tumblr No Shame November fic challenge. Grace is my OC based off of the film character by the same name from the movie Short Term 12, but other than her name and basic backstory (and the name of her fiancé) most of her story beyond that point is derived from my own headcanons.

On the day that was supposed to be her wedding, junior SHIELD counselor Grace Keller woke up in a civilian hospital with little recollection of what happened to land her there. She blinked against the fluorescent lights and moved to turn her head away, but found her movements restricted by a neck brace.Her heart rate elevated as confusion and fear set in. Pain, too. Only hints of it under a blanket of morphine, but still present.

“Mason?” she called out. Her voice was weak and warbling.

No one replied. But Mason had to be here, he wouldn’t have left her if she was hurt, they were getting married. Unless he was hurt too. Grace tried to remember what happened, a car accident maybe, or an earthquake, maybe—

_Attention all SHIELD agents: this is Steve Rogers._

An alarm started going off from the monitor beside her bed as the breath froze in her throat. Grace covered her eyes with both hands until a nurse pried them away.

“Look at me, Miss Keller, and take a deep breath,” said a man’s voice, low and soothing. He appeared over her a moment later, dark-skinned and patient as he place a hand on her brow. “You’re in the hospital with some minor injuries, but you’re going to be okay. Can you hear me? My name is Farai, I’m looking after you tonight. Breathe _in_ , two, three, four. Hold it, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And now let it out _slowly_ , two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There we are. How’s that feel, a little better?”

“What happened to me?” she sobbed. “Where’s Mason? Oh, god, I don’t remember.”

Farai’s hand shifted from her brow to take her hand, stilling its anxious twitching on the bedspread. “There was…they think it was a terrorist attack,” he said slowly.

_SHIELD is not what we thought it was. It's been taken over by HYDRA. Alexander Pierce is their leader. The STRIKE and Insight crew are HYDRA as well. I don't know how many more, but I know they're in the building._

“The Triskelion building collapsed. Almost every hospital in Washington is full with the injured, it’s going to take time to find your friend, even if he’s here.”

_Or he's in the morgue_ , Grace thought, terror making a ball of lead in her throat. Her unoccupied hand drifted down to her stomach. It felt tender, soft, bruised. Empty. Bile burned in the back of her mouth and she swallowed as she looked up at Farai. He was a soft-spoken man, generous with comfort and touch. He wasn’t only here to look after her health.

“Is my baby dead?” she asked.

His lips tightened and eyes closed with an invisible weight. “You gave birth shortly after you were brought in,” he said, closing her hand between both of his. “Because of your injuries, and because the pregnancy was only 20 weeks in, the baby didn’t survive. I’m so sorry, Miss Keller.”

Covering her eyes again, she took in a deep breath to try and calm down. But it all came out in a long wailing cry.

The rest of the details came to her in fits and starts over the next few days. The acrid stench of smoke and burning metal. The roaring crash of Helicarriers colliding in the air. Watching as agents, her friends and coworkers, were lined up against the walls and shot execution-style. Losing Mason in the mad crush to get out of the burning Triskelion, being trampled, how much it hurt every time she fell or was hit. The screams, oh, god, and realizing that her own voice was one of them. The baby, a tiny silent bruise in the crook of her arm. Her girl. Her Isla.

A social worker arranged for Grace to live in an assisted living apartment until she could reorient herself in the wake of so much tragedy. Mason still hadn’t been found, but there wasn’t much she could physically do to find him while in recovery. His parents and friends were already in the city for the wedding and had taken up the search.

All of her friends had worked with her and Mason in the Triskelion. They were either dead (Rosa), still in the hospital (Michelle), or a traitor (fuck you, Jamie).

The bruises started to fade. Grace was glued to the TV, watching every possible news story covering the takeover for some kind of idea what had happened. Every time her stomach twisted with revulsion she mistook it for the baby kicking, then was overwhelmed by tears. It wasn’t fair. She should have been married by now. They were going to announce the baby news at the reception, because Mason’s parents were Catholic and he wanted to ease them into the concept. She still hadn’t told them. It would be better to break the news when Mason was with her.

“Among the killed is the former SHIELD director, Colonel Nick Fury,” said the woman on-screen. “Right now the one question on everyone’s minds is: was he HYDRA?”

_They almost have what they want. Absolute control. They shot Nick Fury. And it won't end there._

Every time she remembered Captain Rogers’ voice over the loudspeakers, every time she remembered anything about that day, it felt like her skeleton was trying to cave in on itself with residual fear and pain, making her squirm then gasp when she jostled bruised ribs. It was too much to wrap her head around. She had been so full of sadness and tragedy when she met Mason, tight-lipped to share until he drew it out of her bit by bit. Increments of trust built over two years. A relationship. A life.

Would losing the baby break them? It happened to stronger couples all the time. One miscarriage could collapse even the firmest foundations and lead to divorce, and this? This was a terrorist attack on their livelihood, their home, their family.

“Tonight on First Alert: is your loved one living undercover as a member of HYDRA? Our experts weigh in on how to spot the warning signs now that the terrorist organization is back on the rise…”

She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and leaned against the back of the sofa. Was this something they should have seen coming? Could have prevented? But not even Captain America saw it coming until it put him on the America’s Most Wanted list. Word on the street was that he was going back out into the field to root out HYDRA, just like during the Second World War. Still fighting the good fight, even though everything he’d ever known had just come crashing down around him. Could Grace do that? If SHIELD came back tomorrow and asked her to join up, could she really bring herself to return now that she’d seen its darkest side?

Her phone started to ring; Adelite Duarte, Mason’s mom. She was audibly holding back tears.

“They found him, Gracie, they found him, my little boy. He wasn’t in any of the hospitals. They found…he was in the river.”

_I know I'm asking a lot, but the price of freedom is high. It always has been._

It was dark when she left the apartment building, wrapped up in a black jacket with her blonde hair tucked into the collar. Though spring was well upon the city the nights were still cold, so she walked briskly, only looking up from the sidewalk to check for oncoming traffic. It was a week from her supposed wedding day, eight days from the attack. Takeover. Whatever. She should have been on her honeymoon in New Orleans, not walking to the site of her fiancé’s death.

The water was black, glimmering grimly with city lights — now reduced by the absence of the Triskelion looming overheard. Candles and flowers and posters had been set up to memorialize those killed. A few mourners were leaving offerings along the safety rail, looked up when she approached. 

Grace ignored them, walking down the line until she found the photograph of Mason that his friends had put up after his body was found that morning. He was dark-haired and plump (soft, he liked to say), with a cheerful disposition that belied how much pressure he put on himself at work. While she was only a junior counselor, Mason was Level 6, he handled agents with secrets so deep they had to be taken to an office off the main counseling floor for sessions. Sometimes she could feel that weighing on him in the dark of night, but he was good at expressing his feelings without giving away details.

His likeness beamed up from the photo, one arm around Grace’s shoulders and the other around his mother. He was the model foster care success story, adopted at nine years old by his mom and dad and completely absorbed into their existing family, Mexican language and culture and all. Even though it sometimes bothered him that his bio-mom abandoned him, he never once believed he didn’t have a family. 

She hadn’t been so lucky, as a kid. Only when she was eleven and her mom died did she meet her dad for the first time — and it turned out Mom had kept her away from the man for good reason. Grace went into foster care when he was arrested and aged out of the system. She didn’t like to think about that man.

That was something she and Mason had bonded over, in the beginning. He liked to boast about his family, show off pictures, answer questions about what it was like to be adopted, defy the idea that adopted families could be anything but perfect, that kids who were given up would always feel displaced even in new homes. His family was his family, no matter what. It had really pissed Grace off at first, to think that their experiences were so opposite one another, that she could have had a happy life.

Then he made her believe she still could.

_Gone now_ , she thought, continuing on down the safety rail past the memorial. A cold wind off the water whipped her cheeks pink as she pressed against metal bars. The top crossbar came to her chest, the second one pressing uncomfortably into her middle. _I want my life. I want my family. I want my baby and my husband and my home. I was ready_. She put her feet on the lowest crossbar, laboriously lifting herself up to look down into the water that took it all from her.

How could the world be so fucking cruel? Was she some kind of cosmic stress-test, to see how much pain a human being could possibly handle? Grace swung her leg over the safety rail and sat on top of it. Thinking about her mom. About Mason. About Isla, her baby girl. About everyone who left her.

_It’s not fair it’s not fair I was happy I had a family it’s not fair I’m a good person I do my job well I pay my taxes I volunteer I exercise it’s not fair I was so good for so long it’s not fair why did this happen what did I do to deserve this it’s not fair where’s my baby it’s not fair where’s my mom it’s not fair where are you what do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do it’s not fair it’s not fucking fair!_

_If a woman jumps off a bridge and there’s no one left to care, does she still die?_

_Did she ever really live?_

“Ma’am?”

The distant remembered _BOOM_ of colliding Helicarriers faded to a dull buzz when she turned her head and realized that she was standing on the other side of the safety rail, both hands clutching cold metal as it physically holding herself back. A young woman was watching her from a few feet away, trepidation clear in wide eyes. A small crowd had gathered at the edge of the memorial, watching her from afar.

The girl cleared her throat. “Please…whatever you’re thinking of doing…j-just don’t, okay?” she called over the wind and water. “We called an ambulance, they’ll take you somewhere to get better.”

Grace’s shoulders tensed. They thought she was going to jump? She looked down into the water, unwillingly imagining what Mason’s body must have looked like after four days in there. Given over to moss and fish and silence. It might be a good night for a swim, actually. Warm. Quiet. No one to bother her anymore.

_There’s nothing stopping you just jump just do it there’s nothing left for you here just jump I SAID JUMP JUST JUMP YOU STUPID BITCH JUMP!_

“ _Please, don’t!_ ”

Her hands loosened from around the rail, pulled inexorably toward the edge. There was a name for that, when people are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and feel like there’s some invisible force pulling them closer. Maybe there was just a kind of darkness inside everyone in that kind of situation, egging them on toward the inevitable. Reminding them that it didn’t matter, anyway.

The girl’s voice rose to a terrified scream as Grace took the step over the edge — only for something to yank her back to the rail by a hank of her jacket. A thick set of arms wrapped around her chest and lifted; she writhed and squirmed to try and free herself but her arms were pinned to her sides. She kicked and screamed and fought to get back to the edge, back to the water, she had to go, Mason needed her, but at least two people were already dragging her back over the rail and holding her face-down in the dust, crying Mason’s name. 

“I have to go,” she sobbed, choking on dirt. “Just let me go, please, please, just let me go, please, god, let me go.”

“You know I can’t do that, ma’am,” one man said in a broken voice. His hand smoothed over her hair, again and again, her heart rate slowing despite the tears. Red and blue lights glinted in the edge of her vision. “I can’t do that. What’s your name?”

Tears and dust mingled into sticky mud beneath her cheek. “My name is Grace,” she choked. “I w-was SHIELD. Now it’s all gone.”

“You’re going to be okay, Grace.”

_No_ , she silently protested as the paramedics took hold of her. She caught a glimpse of the man’s stricken face, the girl’s tears, the huddled crowd with hands clasped over their mouths in shock. _No, I’m not. I’m not going to be okay._


	2. Two

“High place phenomenon.”

“What’s that?” the orderly asked as he forcibly tugged away Grace’s blankets so he could make her get up and change the sheets.

She rolled onto her side, out of his way but not out of bed. “It’s the phenomenon of when people are standing next to a high ledge and feel like they’re being sucked toward it. That’s what it's called. I just remembered.” It had been bugging her for four days. What an easy name for her to forget, too. Embarrassing.

The orderly sighed and put his hands on his hips. “Happy for you, honey, you’ve been working on that one since you got here. But you gotta get your stinky butt out of bed before the nurses make me drag you in for a shower. Don’t get me wrong, you’re cute, but not my type.”

Burying her face in the pillow, she let out a sigh of her own. “Not yet,” she muttered.

“Alright, I’m calling Nurse Ratchet. You getting your cigarette privileges revoked, McMurphy.”

“That character’s name is actually Ratched.”

He shot her a grin from the door. “I know, but Ratchet’s funnier.”

Staring at the wall, Grace listened to his footsteps fading away. Clarke. That was his name. He was a film student, and for the past four days had had the inconvenience of being charged with changing her sheets and dragging her into the shower kicking and screaming. That usually meant some kind of wrestling match and then waiting until she got up to pee to hastily do his job. Poor kid had more to worry about than her, but there she was, making his time harder.

A woman started crying noisily across the hall. Grace rolled onto her back and closed her eyes to shut it out. Not much else she could do when she wasn’t allowed to shut the door.

Three days to go. When she was admitted to the psych ward it was supposed to be for the mandatory 72-hour observation period, but when the doctor evaluated her she was so apathetic and shuttered-off about her thought process leading to a jump into the Potomac that he committed her for a full week. She knew, she _knew_ , that she had to start cooperating or be committed even longer, but every bone and muscle ached too much to stand, let alone skip around socializing.

When she opened her eyes again, the walls started sliding away in the corner of her vision.

“Ugh, god, not again.”

Was it the tedium of lying in bed for four days straight, or her own weakened mental faculties that were causing this distortion of reality? Grace knew that was something she could bring up with the ward doctor, but she didn’t have the energy or lack of shame to do so. The days after Dad was arrested had been much the same, full of embarrassment and the shyness of an emotionally shattered fourteen-year-old child who had just suffered an aborted pregnancy at her pervert father’s hands.

At least she didn't have a roommate yet. She was the odd patient on the ward, it made for quieter evenings. Easier to sleep. The last person she lived with was -- well, it was Mason, and Mason was perfect, but she was thinking about her roommate freshman year of college. Her mind was still in present-tense, unable to accept that he was really gone, that life as she knew it was really over, that she no longer lived with her fiancé, but _had_ lived with him. Mason’s parents were going through the apartment for his things, salvaging what they could of their son’s life before turning the place over to the landlord.

She would have to call when she got out, see if she could get anything of hers before it was all tossed out. The blanket Adelite crocheted for her. The ultrasound pictures of the baby. Her dress, their wedding bands.

God, it hurt like a shard of glass in her throat. Grace covered her head with the pillow until the nurses came to drag her out of bed for a shower.

A nurse waited just outside the bathroom to make sure she didn’t do anything to try hurting herself in the shower, though there wasn’t much in there by way of weaponry. All she really could do without detection was turn the water up as hot as possible without crying out. Until her back was red as a lobster and raw. She couldn’t make it go away, none of it, not the hurt of Mason’s absence nor the baby’s, not the writhing panic that coiled in her veins and her blood every time she remembered the deafening _CRASH_ of the Helicarriers colliding. The groan of support beams as they ground together, straining the remain upright after the third carrier sliced the top off a tower. The screams. The gunshots. Oh, God. But the water. The hot water dimmed it, a little.

_Rap rap rap_ on the door frame. No door. “Two more minutes,” called the nurse. Grace turned off the water and rose on wobbly legs to dry herself.

The closed ward was so _loud_ , so much louder than they seemed when she saw them dramatized and shiny on TV. On her shows they were silent, maybe affected by a faint high-pitched ringing noise to emphasize the deep trauma the heroine had been through to land herself there. It would fade to white, cut to the therapist’s office, the breakthrough, the upward climb. A heroine in full hair and makeup after a supposed week without access to so much as bottle of face wash.

_God, I hate TV._

There were always TVs on somewhere, even after lights out. At the nurses’s station Ellen reruns screamed from straining speakers, a constant wave after wave as extravagant gifts were given away like hysterical ocean tides. Canned laughter in the rec room turned up far too loud because the old lady in Room 7 was going deaf, some drama about an Irish Catholic cop family in New York on a constant loop in Room 2. Room 4 laughing too loud and too long at a racist joke, Room 2’s roommate yelling because he wanted to call his daughter who had died six years ago and the nurses wouldn’t let him. Room 9, crying and crying and crying for no reason at all except she felt like it.

At times Grace considered singing to drown it out. Then she realized it would only make her one with the cacophony.

The doctor asked about her suicide attempt first, then tracked back to how she felt about Mason, really. If she had felt safe with him, if his death weren’t somehow a relief, if she hadn’t opened herself up to an unfortunate situation. If he made her happy. Then he went back further, to college where a TA had threatened to destroy her GPA (and her scholarship) if she didn’t sleep with him. Terrified freshman Grace really thought he had that much power. Then back to high school, her affairs with older men, how outwardly cruel she had been to so many foster parents until they gave up on her. The group homes. Her bastard father. The traumatic ectopic pregnancy that landed her in the children’s Psych ward at fourteen. Her mom’s death when she was eleven.

“ _Jesus Christ, do you want my bra size, too?!_ ” she screamed across the tiny office.

The doctor — she didn’t even know his name, didn’t care, didn’t want to care — only blinked and kept his expression neutral. Waiting for her to deescalate like a fucking child. She hated him.

There was too much, it was too big and too heavy for her to carry in quiet moments. Moments like these were supposed to be full of planning a funeral or memorial, keeping busy to evade the inevitable grief, but instead Grace had nothing but the deafening background noise and her blank ceiling and her thoughts. The twisting coil of anxiety low in her gut, the agony that made her legs curl up to her aching middle, made her shudder and shake like a fever under four layers of blankets, wake up screaming in the middle of the night when she finally managed to sleep.

The first two days she slept constantly. The next two days after that it wouldn’t come at all, and the last day before her release saw her sitting up in bed, trying to be friendly and cooperative at long last. When the doctor spoke to her she offered tiny shaky smiles, gave the answers she knew he wanted to hear, crossed her fingers under the blankets like a conniving pre-teen.

The end result: an empty apartment and more tears from her would-be in-laws.

“I’m fine,” she insisted with a hand on Adelite’s warm fleshy arm. “It’s just a formality that you had to drive me home. Seriously, I’m totally clear. It was just a bad moment.”

“Are you sure?” sniffled the woman who had insisted Grace call her _Mama_ when her only adopted son proposed. There was no genetic link, but she couldn’t stand to look at the old woman for the familiarity to the son. In her wet dark eyes, in the smile lines around her mouth, in her concern.

She nodded. “I’m really, really fine.”

It was that easy, and Grace had no idea why she did it. Why she so desperately wanted to be alone, except maybe to kill herself unsupervised. But even that idea held little appeal now; the idea of failure — _was_ failing to commit suicide considered a failure, or success of instinct? — made shame twist in her gut. There was no way she could bear that hospital ward again, not those nurses, not that doctor who made her want to _apologize_ for her shitty life inconveniencing his obvious brilliance.

Creeping through the apartment on bare feet, calloused soles whispering on hardwood, taking in the place where a happy couple used to live. Where the happy couple were getting married, expecting their first of many fat, happy babies. Where a life might have started. Could have.

The bed still smelled like Mason, Irish Spring soap and sweat and something deeper, more primal, all human pheromone that made her want to scream into the pillow. It was mid-morning, the odds of all the neighbors being at work was pretty high, maybe she could get away with some harmless destruction if she checked the hallway first, called the super and mentioned she was making a student film in her apartment, any noise was all part of the act, blah, blah, blah.

When had she gotten good at lying? She used to stumble over the slightest indiscretion, even in her darkest fuck-you-punk teenage rebellion days. Lying made her stomach hurt, and now it rolled off her tongue — not easily, not by far, but more convincing. Fragility could be compelling toward trust. _She’s so sad and small and broken, how could she possibly lie to me?_

Utter bullshit.

The unused office was going to be the baby’s nursery. Isla’s nursery. They had discussed names of both genders for a week before finding out the baby was a girl, yelling suggestions and recommendations across the apartment, wondering if their neighbor might hear and feel warmed. Like he was part of it. After a few days it became clear that Mason liked the classics, Charlotte and Heston and Margaret, and Grace tended to get a little bit weird with her baby names, Orlean and Kellen and (she wouldn’t hear the end of it, ever, had only Mason lived) Tzipporah.

“We could call her _Zip_ , it’d be _adorable_ , and she’d be a _roller derby champion!_ ” she had yelled through her own crippling laughter, watching her husband-to-be fight not to piss himself making fun of her.

Isla was a compromise. Old-fashioned but not too dated to get her teased on the playground. Pretty, too, unique enough that there wouldn’t be any other girls with her name. And Mason had been looking forward to making _No Man is an Isla Unto Himself_ jokes. Dad jokes he would never tell.

She was all alone in the world again.

Crawling up onto the bed they shared, she rested her back against the wall and let the anxiety of loss take over. Her legs pumped slowly but with effort, like trying to swim in thick molasses, stomach churning, muscles shivering until she finally lurched forward and rocked back into the wall. _Thud_. Then again, _thud_. The impact resonated through her aching bones, still-healing ribs, ever little irritant or bruise magnified ten times. Every breath shuddered in her chest.

_Thud. Thud. Thud._

Bedsprings creaked on the other side of the wall and Grace caught her mistake with a flare of hot rage deep in her gut. Oh, there it was. There went denial and here came anger. Her neighbor was jumping out of bed — _sleeping in pretty late this time, huh? Pretty fucking tired_ — woken by her grief.

Paranoia-pricked ears honed in on the footsteps in the other apartment as they faded unevenly away. She was no goddamn super soldier but she knew, she could tell that they were going toward the corridor. A second pair of steps joining in, delayed but following in the trek to then all. They were faintest then, far away from her, and yet Grace knew exactly where they were. Crawled out of bed and floated like a phantom to the door.

Steve Rogers looked like hell on the other side. Better than her, better by miles, more tired than hurting, and she hated him. Hated his ability to survive the worst when a better man, a man who loved her, had died. She had allowed him, _invited_ him into her home so many times.

His jaw dropped at the sight of her. Yeah, she looked like a monster, like a big walking bruise, let him see. Let him see the good work he had done. Because it was all his fault, wasn’t it? If he didn’t have to be such a goddamn hero, this fucking messiah, everyone piling over one another to wipe his ass for him, even now a friend hovering nearby in case he needed anything. Any goddamn thing. _What about what I need? What about my fiancé? What about my baby? Who’s going to be mine, now? This was supposed to be my forever family, the family every foster kid dreams of, and you took it from me with all your fucking grandeur_.

“We were counselors for _SHIELD_ ,” she explained needlessly. Rogers flinched as if she tried to hit him, when Grace couldn’t make so much as a move.

His eyes flickered up, behind her, taking in what she had just taken in. The apartment picked clean of Mason’s possessions, evidence of his life, by well-meaning parents who had wanted to protect her feelings. She watched the desolate hope that flickered across his face, convincing himself that maybe it was all still okay.

“Mason?” he asked, each syllable a stab. “Is he okay?”

She said — something. The kind of words that stuttered deliriously off the tongue, meant only to hurt, to strike an emotional blow, the kind of terrible things she used to spit in the faces of foster parents who had only wanted to help her. Grace didn’t even know what she said, but it worked. Rogers looked like he’d been slapped, like he was the corpse, and then she slammed the door shut. She sat against it and she cried, she wailed like an animal until it felt like her ribs were breaking all over again. It was over.


	3. Chapter 3

Steve Rogers liked his apartment in DC. It was spacious, just far enough from the Triskelion to afford some privacy, and offered a good view from every window. He could be alone there. He could think there, catch up on the pop culture he’d been missing without being laughed at, look quietly back on his life so far and wonder _why the hell the walls in this building were so thin_.

Seriously, it was ridiculous. His bedroom wall was shared with the apartment bedroom next door, so when he lie awake he could hear his neighbor snoring. All night. Thankfully he’d become very practiced in falling asleep wherever was necessary during wartime, or he probably would have had to move rooms just to get a wink of shut-eye. And he needed less sleep than the average man. Much less sleep than the guy next door, apparently. Who was a nice enough guy, no bones about it, he invited Steve over for a beer or two every time the Dodgers played from the first week he lived there, fresh out of New York.

“About time someone took that place, al _right!_ ” he had grinned behind a scruffy brown beard and twinkling dark eyes, clasping Steve’s hand to shake. A good grip. “I’m Mason. Good to meet you, man.”

If he recognized Steve from the papers, Mason never said so. Not once. Every so often he’d give a kind of acknowledging nod when Steve came home battered from an assignment, offer him some help or refreshment to speed his recovery. Every time Steve waved him off, feeling a little awkward but also…yeah, also pleased. The nurse across the hall was nice to look at and everything, but he didn’t get much casual, friendly interaction these days.

Only after four repeated invitations did he finally cave and watch a baseball game in the apartment next door, seated on opposite ends of the couch like book-ends, sipping cold beer and occasionally cussing at the TV screen.

“So, what do you do?” he asked during a commercial break. “Job, I mean.”

Mason grinned again — sure was fond of smiling, that one — and shook his head. “Life counselor to the stars, man. All the way. It’s a pretty low-key lifestyle, I like it, and I get to help people, so it all works out. Plus, okay, the cutest girl started working under me last year? Got promoted, so I can finally ask her out _without_ coming across a little hedonistic. _Boo-yah_.”

He chuckled softly, hands awkwardly tangled around the sweating beer can between them. “Well, that’s good. Counselor to the stars. Doesn’t sound like such a bad gig.” And a pretty girl, too. Not bad at all.

Mason didn’t ask what he did for a living, as if he knew already. Whatever the reason, he was grateful.

At least until Mason actually started dating this girl. It was bad enough hearing the guy snore at night, but he seemed to prefer home cooking for dates. For hours every week, at least once a week, Steve would be subjected to the sounds of clanging pots and pans accompanied by the rise and fall of pleasant, flirtatious conversation. It was agony, especially when he was sitting alone at his kitchen table, eating enough food for dinner to feed a small family. They sounded happy.

Then one night the talking and laughing were cut off mid-sentence, punctuated after several moments of silence by their shy elated laughter, and he felt like a lech, a hot blush rising up his neck. He packed up his leftovers and went for a run.

Despite his inability to make out any specific words that they said, he was also unable to unhear some of the sounds that came in the night. Once — and only once — he pounded on the wall in a frustrated attempt to get some peace and quiet. The sighs and occasional moans cut off, then were replaced by embarrassed giggling and Mason yelling, “ _Sorry, bro!_ ” through the drywall and useless insulation.

The girlfriend either didn’t come around very often, or she came over when Steve was out of town on SHIELD business; they didn’t cross paths in the hall for months, not even a single “Walk of Shame” (he crossed that one off his list weeks back) when he came home from his morning runs. The sound of her voice through the wall was pleasant enough, her laugh a rare but lovely bird. Sometimes, late at night — while cursing how little sleep he needed — he could hear them talking softly, exchanging secrets and hopes and desires, their words interspersed by her crying as she spilled her heart and soul to the man next door.

Christ, he was lonely.

An operation in Germany that went south found him walking a little stiffly into his apartment one winter’s morning, lip busted and eye blackened and generally feeling like shit. He automatically glanced down the hall while unlocking his apartment door and saw a small stack of boxes outside Mason’s door. Two labeled _clothes_ , two _kitchen_ , one _knick knacks_ , and another _books_. Steve frowned.

“You moving?” he asked when Mason stepped out into the hall. He was either dressed in working clothes or just…his clothes.

The thirty-year-old beamed like a little boy on Christmas morning. “Nah, moving _in!_ Grace, come meet your new neighbor!”

Around his back came a slim woman with dusky blonde hair, brown eyes, the kind of face one might find on the babysitter or the shy girl in the back of class. Her smile was warm and open, eyes slightly wide with the hint of what Steve believed to be recognition when she looked at him. Instead of blurting anything out, however, she simply asked, “Hey, that looks nasty, you okay?” in a soft, slightly raspy voice.

He remembered the state of his face and cringed. “Yeah, I’m fine,” dismissed Steve with a wave of his hand. Then he offered it out to the girl. “I’m Steve, it’s good to finally meet you, Miss…?”

“Oh! Sorry, yeah, of course, I’m Grace Keller," she replied. Her handshake was firm and steady. "It's really nice to meet you, too."

"You wanna join us for dinner tonight?”

Oh, God save him. Steve quickly waved off the offer. “No, no thanks, ah, that’s real nice, but I already ate.” It was quickly sinking in for Steve that if Mason’s girlfriend was moving into his apartment it would only make his own life seem more desperately desolate. If date night was bad, this was going to be worse. One long, endless date night. Maybe it was time to start looking into a new apartment.

But he didn’t. Mason and Grace vanished back inside the apartment — _their_ apartment — and the first days were hell. The laughter, the shuffle and scrape of furniture and boxes across the floor as they rearranged things, even the goddamn companionable silences were torture to his synapses. He hated it, hated them for being so normal and adjusted and well. He hated their fights and their cheerful chatter over dinner, the sounds of them fumbling through making breakfast on Sunday long after he had been on his morning run, the comfortably awkward fumble of their lovemaking on the other side of his bedroom wall. Who the hell designed this building and thought putting the bedrooms back-to-back was a good idea? He started looking for a different apartment, then the couple insisted he come to theirs for dinner because Mason made “ _way_ too many enchiladas,” and even though he could see right through the ruse he found himself not caring. He went.

And it was actually a lot of fun. They were a crude but educated couple. Mason was raised by Mexican foster parents and knew the language and culture well. He was the first to make jokes and made sure everyone’s glasses were always full, dropping kisses to his girlfriend’s golden hair when he passed. Grace hadn’t done much traveling since a spring break trip to Cancun in her college days, but she had lived in the international housing on her campus and devoured foreign documentaries like potato chips. She spoke with her hands, trying to pick words out of the air when she couldn’t find them, laughing loudly at herself, brown eyes glimmering and crinkled deep around the corners.

They held hands under the table, exchanged loving ‘I hate you’s and accidentally drank from the same water glass more often than not. Steve liked them. They weren’t condescending about the things he didn’t know. If Mason made an obscure TV reference Steve didn’t understand Grace was more likely to tease her boyfriend (“God, you are such a nerd”) before patiently explaining the joke with amusement dancing in her honey-brown eyes.

“Did you make this?” he asked her, gesturing at a pencil-drawn portrait of Mason that had been stuck to the fridge with alphabet magnets.

She hummed affirmatively and opened said fridge to get two more beers. “Little hobby of mine, it’s no big deal, not even very good…” A flush colored her features, suddenly girlish, unused to showing off. Still, she tapped her beau’s portrait on the nose with the butt of a beer bottle before returning to the table.

“She’s great,” Mason insisted, growing tipsy with rosebuds blooming high on his cheeks. “At least her pictures are _way_ great compared to mine.”

“ _Everyone’s_ art is great compared to yours.”

“Aw, babe, you know exactly how to stroke a dude’s ego.”

Grace grinned mischievously, her head resting on one hand as she shot Steve a _look_ , as if it were his joke to share, too. “One of my many various talents. Okay, anyone feel like ice cream with their pie? I’m having ice cream with my pie, it’s totally allowed in my—uh,” she broke off and straightened, face flushing red as she and Mason shared a terrified glance.

Then she started to laugh, giggling, really, shaking so hard with mirth that she almost dropped the empty plates in her hands and had to put them back down on the table. At Steve’s confusion she only shook her head and added: “And I’m putting _pickles_ on my ice cream, too.”

It took a good minute, but Steve looked over the table again, his and Mason’s empty beer bottles, Grace’s iced tea, the blissful affection between them that could be easily mistaken as the honeymoon phase of new cohabitation, how Mason seemed to emotionally curl all the way around her when he so much as touched her shoulder. And the pickles bit, which had been a well-known reference to pregnancy cravings even back when he was a boy. Grace and Mason were having a baby.

He smiled at them, breathing through the sudden twisting ache of loneliness in his gut. “Well, hey, I’ll just take the pickles,” Steve shrugged, and the couple laughed all over again.

They were sweet kids (which felt weird to think, considering he was physically a few years younger than Mason), and after a few more visits and one party Steve realized he genuinely liked them. He started to feel more connected to his life, like he belonged in the apartment he rented here, like he was really present in this strange future world that still sometimes baffled him. He looked forward to seeing them after trips away, running into Grace at the mailbox, pounding on the wall when Mason got too excited yelling at the football game.

What he really liked about them was that Steve was certain they knew exactly who he was. After all the airtime he got in the wake of the Chitauri invasion almost everyone in the building had called him out at least once, other than the pretty nurse across the hall (whom he was definitely planning to talk to for more than five seconds soon). If anything they played it off as if _they_ were the shy, private ones. They barely shared anything about themselves, except that they were both counselors, but not for which company they worked. Grace’s mother died when she was young, but she revealed neither the how nor why nor what happened next, and that was fine with Steve since they didn’t ask him, _Hey, are you possibly a flash-frozen super soldier from the 1940s?_

They weren’t his best friends. He wasn’t even sure he completely trusted either of them. But they were good people, grounded, loving, fragile, human people who weren’t tangled up in all the SHIELD mayhem. It was good to keep folks like that around, to remind himself exactly who he was fighting for.

The last time he saw Grace and Mason they were leaving for work the day he was called in to consult on Project Insight. His arm draped across her shoulders, her hand self-consciously smoothing down the sweater over the small curve of her pregnancy. Both of them looked up and beamed when they met his eye, wished him a good morning, a great day, and went about their lives.

When he was released from the hospital and allowed to return to his apartment (convinced that he somehow still smelled of smoke and the murky Potomac), Steve had looked forward to seeing them. Checking in, making sure they were alright in all the chaos. Letting their happy noise distract from his misery.

The apartment was silent.

It’s a coincidence, he told himself. Just a coincidence. They were on vacation, one last trip before they got married and became parents. Then he remembered the date and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Their wedding was two days ago. An invitation slipped under his door one morning but he had passed up the chance to inadvertently steal their thunder by letting nosy relatives recognize him. They were on their honeymoon. It was fine.

The silence grated at the inside of his ribcage even as he consumed himself in the research of what happened to Bucky. Sam slept in his apartment most nights to keep an eye on him, make sure he wasn’t going insane or starving himself. It wasn’t himself he was worried about.

_Thud. Thud. Thud._

He jolted awake after having dropped into an impromptu nap somewhere around 0900. The bedroom wall was vibrating softly under the pressure of something soft and blunt knocking into it again and again. Grace, Mason, or both? Steve twisted his legs free of the sheets and staggered out toward the hall.

“Steve?” called Sam groggily from the sofa, followed by a thump as he hit the floor. Steve ignored him, shoved through his own door and down to the next apartment over.

For some reason, he didn’t want to knock on the door. A kind of dreadful energy seemed to radiate from the wood, into his flattened palms as Sam’s footsteps followed him out into the hall. He could hear someone moving behind the door, someone slight but shuffling ( _limping_ , he realized with a jolt of unease) toward him. Before he could knock the door swung open.

A ghost in the shape of Grace Keller met him in the foyer of the apartment. Dull, blank eyes looked straight through him. The shadows of healing bruises lined her jaw, cuts still healing and scabbed under one eye and across the other brow. More bruises vanished under the neck of her baggy t-shirt. When Steve looked downward, unable to help himself, where there should have been a growing pregnancy were only her hands, clutching at empty space like the absence still pained her.

His jaw went slack. Grace’s clenched. He pleaded with any God out there that she wasn’t about to say what he knew was coming.

“We were counselors for SHIELD,” she ground out through gritted teeth.

_Were_. Past-tense. Counselors for an organization that no longer existed. Steve looked over her shoulder into the empty (too empty, things were missing and far too quiet) apartment behind her. “Mason?” he asked breathlessly. “Is he okay?”

Her jaw popped under strain. Her fists clenched. “They found him in the river, dragging for _your_ precious fucking body.”

Before he could formulate a single word she slammed the door in his face. BANG.


End file.
